How to Create an Orchestral Template in your DAW

A couple of people have asked about creating templates for their DAW of choice (eg. Cubase, Logic etc.), so I thought it might be useful to post this video by Alex Pfeffer where he goes through the whole process using Cubase.

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Emmett Cooke is an Irish composer for film, tv and video games. His music has been used around the world by high profile companies including Sony Playstation, Ralph Lauren, ABC, CBS, NBC, Lockheed Martin and many more.

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JON SHIPP

what if i wanted to Compress or eq one patch within one instance lets say “strings pizz” Would you route its output somewhere else separate from the string grp? why not just have a patch loaded on its own instance on its own instrument track instead of triggering an instance full of 15 patches with midi tracks. Arent you limited to what you can do “MIX WISE” I might not want to add low mid to all the string patches. With all the string patches routed to the string grp i am limited. Sry for the redundancy i just want to make sure what i am saying makes sense.

http://michaelwebermusic.com/ mscottweber

As a disclaimer, I have not seen Alex’s video yet (being at work and all) but I solve this issue by choosing to sequence and mix in two different sessions.

My orchestral template (which is in a constant state of flux) consists of 5 kontakt tracks, 1 each for woodwinds, brass, strings, percussion, and miscelleneous. Each of these can have up to 16 tracks of midi routing to them, so I can have up to 16 different string parts/articulation, etc.

Once I have composed and sequenced my piece in this template session, I bounce each individual midi track down to a wav file. It is important to make sure that all of the audio files are 0-alligned (each file begins at the same spot in the piece, even if there will be silence for a minute before the instrument comes in). I then open up a brand new session, import all of those wav files,and do my mixing from there.

Benefits:

– It will give you enough control to be able to EQ your Hi String Pizz different than your Lo String Legato

– It will free up all of the computer resources that your kontakt instances were taking up

– Seperating the creative composing part from the technical mixing part can help you be more proficient at each; a left-brain/right-brain thing

– If you ever need someone else to mix your piece, you can just send them all of the audio files that you bounced.

Gary Corbett

Very helpful. Definitely a time, and brain saver. Makes A LOT of sense. I would love to see how you create stems, at the completion of your project. Thanks for the video. Look forward to more!